Sam Harris

We look at Arabic, or Japanese calligraphy, or Hindi text and are astonished that anyone can read it.  But, take a scrap of paper on which you have scrawled a note in cursive writing.  Turn it over and hold it up to the light so the text is verticle.  We can read THIS?

What if ‘people of faith’ were able to do this with their religion?  Is a religion like Christianity designed so that the believer dare not look at it from a different perspective?  That he will be punished, or invoke his God’s wrath, or betray his creator if he does so?  “What is this stuff about the Earth being 6000 years old, or humans being made out of dust a few thousand years ago?  I believe THAT?

Can Christianity be compared to a house of cards?  Don’t shake the table!  Don’t remove that card!  Don’t breath on it!
Don’t inspect it that way!  Is the ‘rock of ages’ so fragile that it cannot withstand the breath of a few self-evident facts of geology and biology?

unsmoked - 23 July 2008 06:25 PM

We look at Arabic, or Japanese calligraphy, or Hindi text and are astonished that anyone can read it.  But, take a scrap of paper on which you have scrawled a note in cursive writing.  Turn it over and hold it up to the light so the text is verticle.  We can read THIS?

What if ‘people of faith’ were able to do this with their religion?  Is a religion like Christianity designed so that the believer dare not look at it from a different perspective?  That he will be punished, or invoke his God’s wrath, or betray his creator if he does so?  “What is this stuff about the Earth being 6000 years old, or humans being made out of dust a few thousand years ago?  I believe THAT?

Can Christianity be compared to a house of cards?  Don’t shake the table!  Don’t remove that card!  Don’t breath on it!
Don’t inspect it that way!  Is the ‘rock of ages’ so fragile that it cannot withstand the breath of a few self-evident facts of geology and biology?

Applying this to fundamentalist new earth Christianity is different than applying it to a liberal form of Christianity.  But generally speaking I think the operation of a belief system depends on not questioning, or questioning only in ways that support the belief.  That is the beginning.  Then a time comes when the believer becomes an initiate and is incapable of looking at things in any other way.  That was the real sense of Pascal’s suggestion that a person follow the forms of religion and eventually they would become religious.  A novice sees their belief in terms of events in the world.  An initiate sees the world in terms of their belief.